Bananas Don't Travel Well

butcher in Aleppo soukBack in the U.S., when we told people we were going to Syria, the response we got was usually an uncomfortable pause, followed eventually by, “Oh right, you're Canadian.” (This I chose to interpret as, “oh right, you must be allowed to go—or feel comfortable going—there because you are Canadian”, rather than “oh right, of course you're crazy, you are Canadian.”) Most people seemed pretty hesitant to endorse this adventure, thinking that it must be very dangerous, and we got lots of exhortations to be careful.

eroded pillarAfter Damascus, we moved on to Palmyra, an ancient caravan city in the Syrian desert. We spent two nights there, managed to get up at 4:30 to watch the sun rise over the ruins, and then, together with a "Denwegian" couple (she is Danish, he's Norwegian), embarked on an epic day trip to central Syria's sights with the talented Khaled Ayoubi in his 1977 Pugeot 304.

Roman house, still lived inWe visited Bosra (a town in southern Syria, not the similarly-named Iraqi town of recent headlines) as a day-trip from Damascus (Damascus posting to come soon). An ancient capital of the Nabateans and later the Romans, Bosra is located in the Hauran, a landscape of dark fertile soils peppered with volcanic rocks. This area was an ancient granary, and is still fertile today, as evidenced by orchards and cultivated fields—this part of Syria is not a desert at all.